Window Gods

by Sally Morrison

  ‘He likes going outside,’ Wendy is quick to answer.

  ‘Oh, I can just imagine it!’ I say. ‘Daniel does what he’s told with a smile on his face to keep the peace. He’s going to turn into a peacekeeper, that little boy, and one day he’s going to be wondering where his sense of himself has gone – because it’ll disappear into the squabbling of the loudmouthed combatants. He’ll have been robbed of it. He doesn’t like it at Checkie’s. He’s told me often enough. Honestly, you two have entered untried ground in bringing up Daniel. Sometimes you have to think things out from the point of view of the kid, you know.’

  ‘Homophobe!’

  ‘So that’s all you can say, Wendy! That’s not the point I was making. If you’d listened you’d have heard me putting in a plea to allow Daniel space to create a personality for himself…’

  ‘Space! Just look at the state of this house, Isobel! You can’t move for Daniel’s space!’

  ‘No. Not the space I’m talking about. You still occupy centre stage even in the midst of Daniel’s mess, Wendy. Anyway I didn’t come over here to have an argument about your family situation…’

  ‘Well, why did you bring it up?’

  I’m almost at boiling point. Mustn’t bubble over the top, Isobel, easy now… ‘It’s Nin’s birth family situation that’s relevant here. I brought her up, her father is dying and her “aunt”, if you can call Checkie by so friendly a name, is a person who doesn’t give a shit about Nin’s child, or, very likely, Nin. All she wants to do is steal these paintings from us and look as though she’s justly taken possession of them. If you think auctioneers are shysters, they’re saints compared to Checkie fucking Laurington. But we’re getting off track again. We really do have to decide now which of the paintings belong to Nin and which to me. Nin can do whatever she wants with hers, but if she gives them to David or the Siècle Trust, then she’ll do so entirely against my advice and my wishes and she knows it.’

  Nin is flipping that bloody Bob the Builder toy around on her finger top again. ‘Put it down, Nin! And stop being so bloody pig-headed!’

  ‘These plaits look like shit,’ says Wendy and Nin bursts into big, fat tears. When does she not when faced with conflict? – and runs from the room.

  ‘Nin, come back here!’ I yell.

  ‘No!’ she yells back. And, ‘Fuck you, Wendy! Your face is the wrong shape for French plaits, anyway!’

  Slam!!!!!

  I stand up. I say to Wendy, ‘Just look at her, Wendy – all her life long other people usurping her space! Pretending they’re more important than she is! She owns something in those paintings and if she lets them go, she’s letting her future security fly out the window. Here’s the list and some old photos of the work. Some of the photos are missing, but I’ll go and do a complete inventory; I have to, anyway. But the choices need to be made NOW.

  ‘I have to photograph my share of the paintings to show that they’re in good condition; therefore I need to be clear which paintings are mine and which are Nin’s.

  ‘It’s high time the pair of you started learning what these paintings are in all respects: emotionally, culturally and financially and where Henry Coretti stands among his fellow painters. Don’t rely on David for information, even though his opinion is, in some respects, worth considering. Do the research, Wendy, and stop pretending you’re the victim of circumstances and fate. After all, you’re not a moron. You chose Nin and the pair of you have already taken serious steps into the middle of your lives. It’s time to take some more now and GROW UP!’

  Oh dear, I’m sitting at the wheel now and it’s not good car-driving karma. I’ll have to make my way through the burbs with great care and, when I reach home, do the job of sorting the work out myself, since I can’t, on the face of things, trust them to do it for me. They’re just as likely to come back at me in righteous rages. It’ll all be my fault. I’m such a shit, I must be to blame.

  If I assign what I think of as the pick of the crop to Nin, it looks as though I won’t be safeguarding them and I’ll be left with nothing much to fight for. Time to chop the fingers off the side of the overloaded lifeboat. Or that’s what my conscience says. In this condition. When I’m feeling frustrated, humiliated and angry.

  My foot is trembling on the clutch, preparing myself to start up, when Nin hurtles out of the house, slap-bang onto the street beside the car. She jumps in beside me, flings her arms around my neck. ‘Oh, I’m so sorry Bel! So sorry! I love you very much! You’re a patient, good and loving person! I’ll choose. I promise. And I’ll hold on to my share.’

  Well…thank the good dirt into which we turn for that!

  ‘I love you, too, darling.’ And I do. ‘Just please be brave for me. It’s not that hard. We really do have to live as sensibly as we can and not let people who’ve treated us badly get away with what belongs to us.’

  Mick has been testing and retesting floodlights and lenses in my hallway, although it’s not as if we are going to enter these photos in a high art competition. He has bought little arc lamps – cheap ones – and extension cords; loves a gadget, does Mick.

  Lexie’s place is a forty-minute drive from Melbourne, on the edge of bushland that used to belong to Vance and Suzanne in the days when people were trying to get large areas of it protected by the Victorian Government. We used to busily plant trees out there as part of a community project called A Million Trees, now the few that survived the planting have probably been done for by the drought – so much for all our good intentions.

  The floor-to-ceiling racks of the storage facility are about twenty feet high and I’m beginning to wonder how we’ll get decent shots of everything for the court case. We need to be able to show once and for all that the paintings are in good condition and likely to stay that way. No doubt they’ll have a decent stepladder – you don’t go to all that trouble to create good storage without a decent stepladder…

  My car doesn’t have mod cons like a CD player but it does have a tape deck and air-conditioning, so, with Mick at the wheel, and the passenger seat in recliner, I slipped Fernando Sor’s arrangements of Mozart for guitar onto the deck and listened to soothing music most of the way up to Lexie’s place. My favourite piece, played deliciously by Turibio Santos, is Grand Solo, with its glorious conversational pauses, its nods and bows, its elegant dancing and conversing and graceful verve. Mozart’s life was turbulent and yet these elegant fragments flowed. You can listen to Grand Solo on many levels, down to the notes being plucked, with confidence and discretion, on the guitar. It’s music that knows where it’s going and takes you there, albeit that the fields outside the window of my peace bubble were parched and the countryside was oppressed by drought all across the valley floor. Not only has there been no rain here for years, but there was a severe frost at the end of winter and many of the vintners are in trouble.

  Soon we were meandering up into the hills, where Lexie’s enterprise missed the frost and still sees enough highland moisture to keep her vines cropping. In spite of all, she’s had good vintages for two years in a row, but this year doesn’t look promising. Everything is friable, crumbly, ready for flames and it is hard to think of abundance. The sight of it made me feel hesitant, as if I’d made a silly mistake by using Lexie’s storage, but it was reassuring to pull into her lower drive behind its high fire-deflecting mound.

  Her upper drive forks off at road level and leads to her vineyard and cellar door: tourist buses were grinding gears up the slope, kicking up a lot of dust. Lexie wants to have the drive surfaced to stop dust getting onto the vines but it’s an expensive business and she thought she’d get the bunker done first – that way, the money she earns from storage can go towards the surfacing.

  The bunker is nicely tucked in under Lexie’s hill, sheltered from the prevailing north-westerlies. Lots of artists and artisans in the area store with her and a number of people who are afraid of bushfires in extreme summers like this one, and mindful of the horrendous ones that have torn through th
is area in the past, store their valuables here while they go to sit out the season in the city. It’s essentially a big factory shed with insulation and climate control inside. There’s a well-stocked office with an airlock and the artworks are stored in a cube within a cube of other storage, so there are two layers of fire retardation before they are reachable. The rates are good, the building is new and more than meets current bushfire specifications.

  Feeling lulled by a liquid trip of the mind with Mozart, I let myself approach the photography in a pretty good mood. Eli, I tucked away for the time being in a gentle, forgiving fold of my grey matter. There was lighting to be fixed, a ladder to be scaled by a big man – Mick – and photos to be taken of largish works from close up. In the event, there were missed edges, refocusings and disagreements about the colour adjustments – how is it that Mick and I see colours so differently? I kept saying, ‘No, sorry, you have to match what’s in front of you to what’s on the camera.’ ‘But I have.’ ‘No, no, no, no, give it here!’ ‘Well, you get up the ladder and do it then!’ So I got up the ladder and did it and the difference between his photos and mine is very obvious to me, but not to him. He prefers his, but, I think to myself, it’s not preference we’re after, it’s verisimilitude.

  What I see is coloured by what I have been seeing since I was a teenager. I know these paintings; they are my memory trace, the subtle piece of graffiti on the wall of the toilet block, the sloughed-off boredom in a tossed bottle, the evil being born in the eyes of a boy as he watches the instinctual seductions of Allegra – and my own anxious and resentful expressions bobbing in the wake. I can’t expect Mick to see what I see and when I try to point it out, he’s less than enthralled. We squabbled on lightly and resignedly until lunchtime, when Lexie, a Gen X Amazon with a high blonde ponytail and a filly’s gait, swung downhill from the restaurant to invite us up to her parents’ table. Vance and Suzanne have joined the Australia Day throng: they’re here to look at their patch of bushland and they want to join us for lunch. Mick said he was looking forward to meeting Vance at last.

  It’s a blessing that Mick is easily brought around to an even temper; we don’t have to waste chunks of life in high dudgeon and sulks, but I do know that it depends on me to set the direction. If I plunge, he plunges too, so it’s better not to plunge. Busloads of day-trippers, juggling bottles of wine and little platters of finger food, the women carrying their high heels, their feet aslant on Lexie’s steep lawn, were sitting down in groups, tasting glasses slung around their necks on lanyards. This demographic, on the shadowy side of the property where the grass is still greenish around the duck pond, all shoulder strap and clavicle as we picked our way among them. Legs oozed like umber from skirt tubes onto the tartan-gridded picnic rugs. The men wore floppy shorts and cotton shirts with all the buttons undone, their big feet arching and flexing round the rubber toe-trees of their thongs. ‘Geez,’ said a pierced piece of girlery close at hand, ‘these boob tubes sure squash ya tits.’

  The national day out.

  By the time we reached the restaurant on the hilltop, I had that duck pond-cum-dam on my mind and was considering its position relative to the storage bunker. Dadda’s voice was saying in my ear, A sensible person would have stored them in town, but Lexie’s voice was saying, ‘It’s okay, you know, downhill all the way, the water can build up quite a force. Besides, the bunker’s flanked with water tanks that hug the walls.’

  I told Dadda’s voice off, I said, Look, you, Lexie’s got fabulous shins – see how long they are from the knee to the ankle! They’re perfect, like her storage. You’d break your toe on those, so just get out of my ear. But he was still there tickling my neurosis until I felt compelled to ask, ‘Wouldn’t the house be likely to go up, situated uphill where it is?’

  ‘Yes. It would. That’s why we put the bunker down the hill. House up for the view and bunker down for safety. It would be pointless defending the house; we’d defend the bunker. But, in the first place, the house is made of mudbricks and, although they’re labour-intensive, they’re fairly easily replaced, and in the second, it would only catch alight through ember attack because it’s skirted by the vineyards; the bush doesn’t come up to it. The wind would need to be very strong and very high to rain embers on the roof. Don’t worry, Isobel, the set-up’s quite special. I can give you a plan of the place and the fireproofing rationale if that’ll help you make a defence with the lawyers.’

  ‘Good idea. Yes, I can put it to them that the design means the paintings are pretty safe.’ Dadda’s presence was growling and grinding his thumbs against his fingers in the way he used to, but I told him, Down, boy. Allow me to be alive and dealing and yourself to be dead and out of it.

  ‘I’d hate to lose you as a customer, Isobel – you’re the celebrated example. I was going to ask you when the photos are ready if we could use them in our brochure? Accredited and low pixels, of course.’

  ‘What, a sort of “guess whose work is stored out here” advertisement?’

  ‘You don’t think it’s a good idea? It’s just that you need to use every asset you can to get custom these days. No such thing as discretion anymore.’ And, in the most open possible way, there’s nothing discreet about Lexie – she is frankly and strappingly the new blonde Aussie, tanned, trained and savvy. She’s a credit to adoption. Maybe she’s the beginning of a new race sent to replace the vacant, blue-eyed staring blonde of yesteryear.

  ‘Well, it’s an idea I’ll take on board,’ I say, ‘but I’d have to caution against advertising where Henry Coretti’s work is kept until after the case is settled. And even if things go my way, I might still be bound by conditions of storage closer to town.’

  ‘I hope not. As I’ve said before in another season we could show those paintings if you’d like that and then you’d get past the objection that they’re important work that’s never seen.’

  ‘Well, of course. You’ve got great walls in the house. But I am a snob, you know. You would have to accompany it with pretty special stuff…’

  ‘You and Nin could curate it. You could choose.’

  ‘Well, yes, that would be fair. But it might entail more work than you’d imagine, because to show Henry Coretti, one would have to borrow from private owners. Checkie wouldn’t be letting us have anything from Siècle, that’s for sure…But yes, the possibility of a public show up here would be one argument that we could put on behalf of our claim.’ But I could hear Checkie’s voice in my head now, breathily mocking the thought of Henry Coretti and the hillbillies. Lexie shows local art and I’d have to admit that it’s more of a community enterprise than a fostering of great works.

  ‘Of course, you could,’ she said, cheerfully. ‘It might never happen, but then again, it might. Anyway, add it to your argument as a possibility and we could talk about it, couldn’t we?’

  ‘Yes, of course we could. And thank you for the offer.’

  This talk made me realise how very, very proprietorial I am about these works. My responsibility for these paintings comes straight from my heart and the thought of even putting them on walls with lesser art fills me with anxiety. They need their own space. In my mind, they have their own space without which they would not be properly seen.

  There are tables on a terrace with paved peninsulas into gardens of standard roses that are holding up well under a regime of almost no watering. Big, ruby-red Mr Lincolns nest in the branches in opening flushes behind little box hedges, some of which are browning. The sky is hazy overhead, dusty, but on the sunny side of the hill you can still see to a distant horizon beyond the rows of vines sweeping away in a long stretch to the road as it disappears into forest. Lexie is optimistic about getting another vintage. ‘But it’s been the toughest year yet,’ she says. ‘There’s been quite a lot of burning and raisining. We might have to sell the crop as table grapes. We try to let the grapes speak for themselves in our vintages, and this lot could just be saying, “Eat me!”’

  Lexie wasn’t brought up on lo
llies. Decay hasn’t touched her. Her only concessions to ‘bling’ are her wedding and engagement rings and a plain gold locket around her neck. She’s Gen X dentally perfect. You could even call her teeth ‘mighty’, they’re so strong and straight and white. She has a smile that wouldn’t have been possible for girls of my generation; in my day, we used to pout with our mouths closed and our colossally Cleopatra’d eyes were the windows to our souls.

  Mick is asking about vintages and Lexie rattles off names: ‘Cab Merlot, Cab Sav, Merlot and Pinot Noir; even the pressings can be good.’ And she continues about the benefits of growing grapes high up. ‘It captures the dew and rains quite well just here, but fifteen kilometres back along that road you came up, they’re in a rain shadow and fifteen kilometres in the other direction, you hit rainforest. It’s all a question of the lie of the land.’

  We take our seats but Mick suddenly starts bumping his great legs about, rattling the cutlery and looking under the table. ‘Good God, what’s that?’ he asks and comes up laughing. It’s a baby wombat being chased around the tables by Lexie’s youngest girl.

  ‘Oh, it’s Gordon,’ says Lexie. ‘The mum was bowled over down the hill and there she was with her little head poking out between the back legs, so-yo-yo cute! So we brought her up here to raise her…The kids called her Gordon before we realised she was a girl.’

  ‘How do you tell?’

  She picks up the little creature with a swoop and points at its belly. ‘You turn them over and you can see the little pouch beginning to form when they’re still pretty young. It’s a funny little concavity to begin with and it forms back-to-front when you compare it to other marsupials so the mum won’t cover the baby with dirt when she digs. The first time I saw one, I thought it was a malformation and took it to the vet! We’ve had a few up here over the years. They’re not at all road wise and get skittled.’

  She hands me over the little brick of a thing and I stroke my finger around its velvet nose. It’s the loveliest feeling – not a thing you can do without exercising your smile muscles. I put a fingertip up behind Gordon’s claws into her cupped foot and feel the furred membranes between the walking pads and massage them as I used to when I owned dogs to make sure there aren’t any pebbles or grass seeds caught in there. ‘Oooh, she likes that.’ Lexie smiles.